AWS is ‘biggest enterprise storage vendor’ in the world

Amazon Web Services is the world’s biggest enterprise storage supplier. Or maybe second biggest, behind Dell. Either way, Microsoft ranks third by revenue share, ahead of NetApp and Huawei.

These are the findings of IT Brand Pulse. To arrive at its conclusions, the tech analyst firm looked first to AWS and Microsoft’s IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) revenues – which both companies publish. Then it tested two assumptions – first, that storage revenues comprised 15 per cent of overall IaaS revenues and and second, that they accounted for 20 per cent of the IaaS pot.

IT Brand Pulse dropped those estimates into the mix with IDC’s Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker numbers for the third 2020 quarter. You can see in the table below how the inclusion of AWS and Azure changes the revenue standings.

IT Brand Pulse’s storage leaderboard table with AWS and Azure numbers added to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker table, December 2020. There are no market share percentages for AWS and Azure as they were not included in the original IDC table.

Based on IT Brand Pulse’s 20 per cent IaaS share assumption, AWS was top of the storage tree in Q3 with $2.32bn in storage revenues in the third calendar quarter of 2020, ahead of Dell on $1.95bn. Tweak the storage percentage of IaaS revenues to 15 per cent, and Amazon eases into second place, on $1.74bn.

Using the 20 per cent of IaaS assumption, Azure was in third place with $1.26bn revs, ahead of NetApp in fourth place on $638m. Microsoft may soon run in to the law of large numbers, but if it maintains its current 59 per cent growth rate, it could overtake Dell’s storage revenues by the end of 2021. That is a big if. However, only Huawei has a storage revenue growth rate that is close to AWS’s 29 per cent, and it is less than half the Azure STaaS growth rate.

If IT Brand Pulse’s working assumption – that storage comprises 20 per cent of IaaS revenues is correct – the combined AWS+Azure storage revenues of $4bn translates into overall market share of 37.6 per cent in Q3 2020. We also note that cloud giants Google, Alibaba and Tencent deliver enterprise storage services – albeit they are a long way behind AWS and Azure.

The trend lines are clear. On-premises storage vendors today represent not much more than half of the overall enterprise storage services, by revenue share, This share will likely shrink further.